From: Niklas Hofer <niklas@...>
Date: 2011-01-05T01:33:33+09:00
Subject: [ruby-core:34062] Ruby 1.9* syscall() on 64 bit systems

Hi,

this may be an old story, but I did not find any solution for this
googeling the internets, Ruby's Issue Tracker has been down for the
last day, so I'll ask you: 

Is it a known bug (feature?) that you cannot syscall() with ruby on a
64bit system? I tested this the last night on a Ubuntu 10.10 amd64 and
got serveral reports by Apple users, that

$ ruby19 -e 'syscall()'

raises a NotImplementedError (not ArgumentError). I dug in the code and
found this comment [1], implemented by Nobu in April 2009 [2] and a
message on this very mailing list 3 years before [3].

Result of the above actions is: If Ruby 1.9 is built on a machine where
sizeof(long) != sizeof(int), the Kernel#syslog method does not get
implemented. Through a little experiment [4] I found out that this is
the case on EVERY 64 bit system.

I took out the preprocessor statement, resulting in a working
syscall() - but I am not sure about the (security/stability)
implications.

Soo.. Is this still intended? Are syscalls so rare that nobody
noticed/cared? Or can this be considered a bug?

regards, Niklas

[1] https://github.com/ruby/ruby/blob/ruby_1_9_2/io.c#L7529
[2]
https://github.com/ruby/ruby/commit/5a809d60bd3ea54474e34f897ae60b1ae78bab73#L0R6981
[3] http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-core/8722
[4] https://gist.github.com/764119
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